The SHIP facility at CERN

Universitá “Federico II” and INFN, Naples, Italy

^a e-mail: giovanni.de.lellis@cern.ch

Published online: 26 April 2016

Abstract

Searches for new physics with accelerators are being performed at the LHC, looking for high massive particles coupled to matter with ordinary strength. A new experimental facility meant to search for very weakly coupled particles in the few GeV mass domain has been recently proposed. The existence of such particles, foreseen in different theoretical models beyond the Standard Model, is largely unexplored from the experimental point of view. A beam dump facility, built at CERN in the north area, using 400 GeV protons is a copious factory of charmed hadrons and could be used to probe the existence of such particles. The beam dump is also an ideal source of tau neutrinos, the less known particle in the Standard Model. In particular, tau anti-neutrinos have not been directly observed so far. We report the physics potential of such an experiment and outline the performances of a detector operating at the same facility for the search for the τ → μμμ decay.